This paper investigates the determinants of the TV audience for Italian soccer in seven SerieA seasons (2008-09 to 2014-15

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between stadium attendance, hooliganism and counter-violence policy measures in Italian Serie A. In particular, this paper analyses the impact of counter-hooliganism policies adopted in 2007 on the quantity of game tickets sold. The counter-hooliganism measures, grounded on an entry card, namely a 'fidelity card', were designed to keep out hooligans from stadiums so favouring the attendance of either occasional spectators or uncommitted fans. According to our econometric investigation the expected substitution between committed fans and uncommitted fans did not take shape. In sum, the 'fidelity card' did not turn to be successful if evaluated on the average attendance perspective. © 2014 German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik

Summary This work examines the relationship between national identity and conflict during international sporting tournaments and the impact of referees as an institutional countermeasure. The empirical analysis covers the FIFA World, Confederations and Under 20's World Cups and Olympic tournaments from 1994 to 2014, resulting in 1152 individual matches. We use the issuing of cards (red and yellow) and the number of sanctions (fouls) as a conflict proxy, plus macro‐level national identity markers to determine between team variations. Our results indicate that national identity is robustly significant in the prediction of conflict, whereas the match‐specific variables seem to be of less importance. Additionally, we observe that referees are a highly successful control of on‐field aggression.

Research question:We consider trading players' trading as one of the distinctive features of football clubs' business models and how these models have been influenced since the implementation of FFPR. Considering the Italian financial and economic context in the football sector, we investigate whether Serie A football clubs adopt earnings manipulation as a result of trading players' economic rights. Research methods: The empirical analysis includes the football clubs competing in the ItalianSerie A from 2005 to 2018. Our sample consists of an unbalanced panel dataset composed of 275 club-year observations (38 different clubs). Our estimations are run by using fixed effects OLS models. Clubs' net capital income from football players' sale are used as a proxy of earning manipulation. We control for clubs' football performance, size and reputation. Results and Findings:By applying Bartov's model based on asset sales, our results confirm that the adoption of asset manipulation behaviours in the football industry wherein players' economic right sales are a preponderant financial item affecting economic performance.Specifically, net income from players' trading is significant and positively linked with Serie A clubs' profitability, while leverage is significant after the introduction of FFPR and especially for the most blazoned Serie A clubs.Implications: Our results confirm that Italian Serie A has been chronically dependent on players' trading to maintain their financial sustainability. UEFA's regulations could be assessed and modified in order to enable them to prevent and reveal the real activities and dynamics behind the player transfer market (profit smoothing behaviours).

This paper investigates the relationship between Football and TV audience looking for empirical evidences from Italian Serie A. The analysis traces previous econometric study, based on season 2008/09, focusing on season 2009/10. Data on 380 matches played in the Italian top professional football league are collected in order to select variables suitable of influencing the share of TV audience on satellite television. We try to estimate the «Football on TV» demand by an OLS regression model introducing a set of independent variables about the match quality, the TV programming placement, the market size of teams and their rank. In addition, our attention concentrates on the relationship between the closeness of the game and the television audience, where uncertainty of outcome is modelled using information from the betting market. It emerges that many of the theoretical expected relationships are confirmed by the econometric analysis, even though some peculiarities emerge with respect to the uncertainty of outcome issue. In particular, closer contexts are important in determining the interest of sporting events, also from the Italian TV audience perspective, but they are not crucial. If the set of explanatory variables includes both the uncertainty of outcome and teams probabilities of winning, a negative relationship between the closeness of the match and TV audience emerges. This result suggests two possible explanations. First, the TV spectators behave just like stadium fans, and they are mainly interested in their own team victory. Second, the negative relationship may be attributed to the «David versus Goliath» hypothesis since neutral positioned fans watch matches on TV in the hope that little teams defeat top ranked teams. Finally, our empirical analysis confirms the decisive role of Inter, Juventus and Milan in determining the size of couch potato audience, supporting the idea of big teams' management that the competitive balance has not a great commercial appeal, and that the collective bargaining of TV rights must not be justified on this ground.